I'm going to respectfully disagree with "difficult grind for influence after nerfs". The way influence is working right now, it doesn't end up doing much anyway, regardless of how much you have it.their nerf was too harsh, it is 10 times lower, I'd have tried something less desperate, like 0.2 to 0.25. But, then again, people seem to love nerfs because they refuse to restart campaigns, they keep the save file from version -50130.32103 to this date... Of course you'll have nothing to spend the influences upon, and it's obvious you'll not notice how difficult it becomes to grind for influence with such a nerf. AI is addicted to passing policies that handicap players that have just joined a kingdom (not all of them, mind you) and you'll basically be struggling with a negative influence per day until you either level up enough (the Charm ****ty policy) or has accumulated enough influence sources.
The liege will try to give you one fief, and until clan level 4 (in case the first fief was a town) won't give you any more. That's just my observation and it may differ from save to save, but the point stands - you are always going to get something, and after that, nothing for a very long time regardless of how much influence you put into it. Derthert will take your city anyway, why bother with the votes at all. So the only applicaiton of voting is to try and tip the scales between several newly defected clans trying to make one of them stay, and you're always gonna pick number of clan members over personal traits regardless. You could use voting to get massive relation advantages, but having high relations doesn't do jack, so again, why bother? xD
That leaves armies as the only real application of influence, and that's where things get interesting.
Passive income is still a big factor in your influence economy, and with an average policy build, not specifically hand-crafted to get even more influence, you can get somewhere near 5-10i per one fief complex (unless Lawspeakers is here to jump on your lawn).
That's, on average, 2 to 3 days to get 1 lord into your army in case you have a city. Having just one fief, basically being a nobody (a noble nobody with land, no less, but still), you can already summon 2-3 dudes to your army in a week's time. That's enough for a medium-scale castle siege, one free castle for you to take every week. No free vassals? Just use the 30i army disband button and get yourself some, it's no biggy.
And while waiting in a fief for a week sounds frustrating (and it is), you're most likely running around in another army or going across Calradia on a T6 armor shopping tour.
So if a nobody gets a free castle steamroller every week, do we really need that process to be even faster? How much power should the player be immediately granted upon joining a kingdom, then?
That said, joining players into kingdoms with negative influence policies (talking about you, Lawspeakers, you prick) is a mess. There's no reason for the faction not to have them, but for the player it's a constant uphill battle to overcome in early game.